


You Die A Hero

by etcortuum



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning, Loss, Love, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:08:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25645561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etcortuum/pseuds/etcortuum
Summary: Or you live to see yourself become a villain.(She's glad he's dead.)In which death is an end to certain things, and those who do not end quickly, carry on too long.
Relationships: Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Pietro Maximoff & Wanda Maximoff
Kudos: 13





	You Die A Hero

**Author's Note:**

> I can't remember what led to this - probably procrastination and denial. Or spite. These things tend to multiply like rabbits. Or bunnies. Plot bunnies...
> 
> Anyway. Enjoy, be safe, etc.

She's glad he's dead. She's so grateful that he won't see himself fall. He spent too many years so afraid of his seemingly inevitable future as a villain - did so many things to try and avoid it - that she's glad he won't have to worry about it anymore. It's a relief, in some ways.

In others, it's the most painful thing she's ever felt. She had clutched his cooling body, had listened to his vitals being read out and repeated again and again, as if FRIDAY were trying to ground her with proof of death. She had wailed and sobbed and gnashed her teeth at the universe.

_How dare you_ , she had said. _How dare you take him from me._

Before his eyes had slipped shut, she'd told him it would all be alright. Had said that they'd be fine and that he could stop now. She had lied. (She was so good at lying.)

He is _gone_ and she will never be okay with this. But she can be glad. She can be glad that he only saw himself stumble; can be glad that he was strong enough to drag himself back up again; can be glad that he was stubborn enough to never let himself slip too far. She will think about these things late at night when the tears won't stop and the bed is too big and the house is too quiet. She will think about them when U and Dum-E and Butterfingers shuffle after Morgan and Peter and Harley. She will repeat these reasons to herself like a mantra when she makes sure Peter has a future outside of heroics; when she encourages Harley's interest in engineering and his hidden talents when it comes to business; when she steers Morgan away from her idolisation of superheroes.

She is glad he died a hero. She will not see her children forced to make the same decision.

* * *

Her sorrow comes wrapped in a military funeral and tears that aren't allowed to fall. She might be a woman, but she won't let them see that as anything other than a strength.

His death breaks something in her. It shatters a thing she'd previously kept well stored in its factory packaging, only allowing it brief glimpses at the world through red painted smiles and charming winks. Her heart is not broken - it has simply ceased to be.

She goes to the parties, celebrates with the best of them, makes all the right appearances at all the right functions. And she does it with a smile. (The consoling pats on the shoulder and the sideways glances go hand in hand. She is a woman, emotional, surely her competency ought to be in question?)

She does not cry for him. (She will not cry for him.)

She can see time passing; can feel something new growing in the cavity left by her devastation. Love is strange, and difficult, and nothing like what she had with him. She lets it happen.

(Without time, she would have crumbled long ago.)

* * *

He dies a hero, a champion, washed clean by sacrifice. (He dies with too many bullets in his back and without the breath or the blood to run to his sister one last time.)

It is painful, this thing he calls death. It lingers at the edges of his vision and it leaves him shaky, unstable, untethered. He shivers at the thought of staying like this ever more.

Like this, though, he can see _her_. She grows away from him - grows some without him there to hold her back. (He will never not believe that he was a weight around her ankles. She had loved him and cared for him and kept him alive, if not whole. In payment, he had followed her. _Perhaps, he had followed her blindly._ )

She seems brighter, this person who was once his sister.

He considers such brightness, then compares it to a star, or perhaps Greek fire. Both fit, though he leans toward the latter. She burns with all the brilliance and flash-bang liveliness of a dying sun, and yet she flames on despite the water that they throw. (He wishes, sometimes, that she would smoulder out when they lifted up their buckets: couldn't she see the scars that she left behind?)

The things he sees, the things he feels, the things he knows. _She is too hot for mere water._

It takes time, but soon the destruction of her passing far outweighs the brightness of her existence. Like a star, she is brightest when the world around her is dark; like a star, when he looks at her for too long the empty blackness starts to swallow her.

She will not stop burning. Every attempt to put her out is met with a hotter flame.

In this place that he calls death, he finds himself wishing that the end, like pain and thoughts and suffering, were also something that they could share.


End file.
